Introduction

From Stellar Deliverable 6.4

1 The objective of the Stellar Open Archive (SOA)

The core objective of the workpackage 6 is to provide Stellar with a technological framework “to enhance mutual learning, support knowledge sharing and facilitate the advancement of one’s own competences and knowledge.” For this purpose, it intends “to implement a variety of communication channels to ease internal exchanges within the network, to make research results known to the respective communities of interest as well as to the European and international TEL community.”

The STELLAR Open Archive (SOA) is one of the components of this framework. The objective of the task 2 which is in charge of its development is to stimulate its use “as part of a scientific portal by STELLAR researchers by offering this service in cooperation with the existing TeLearn OA (www.telearn.org) and providing the support to researchers in order to facilitate the upload and use of the repository. This task will include the creation of the STELLAR scientific portal as a layer of the TeLearn Open Archive, securing the continuity and availability of the archive, monitoring the use of the portal and enhance its international visibility.”

The Stellar scientific portal has been launched early in the life of the network (July 2009). At the same time an enquiry has been carried out to understand the practices and views of the Stellar members of the OAs and their use. Since then, SOA has been continuously developed together with a policy to enhance the partners’ awareness of its potential either to share their scientific production or access the scientific production of others.

2 Review of the evolution and the current situation

SOA is first a repository storing data (resources) and metadata. The emphasis has been put first on text based resources (articles, communication, reports, etc.), a few video are available and this type of resource will be developed later on. On top of this repository discussion facilities have been implemented (blogs and forums) linked to the resources. Then users can either comment on a paper in an elaborated way (using the related blog) or open a thread of discussion (using the related forum). Additionally, users get information about the number of access to the document they are considering, the number of download if a file was associated, and indication about other resources possibly within the same domain of interest .

Some more facilities have been added: a place to discuss general scientific issues, a feed of information about events in the domain, some feedback on the life of SOA (number of resources available, most viewed resources, etc.)

SOA home page (February 2010)

The URL of SOA is: http://oa.stellarnet.eu

In the background of SOA there is the repository of Telearn and the knowhow of its designers. The relation between these two tools must be explained. Telearn is an open archive of TEL resources, for a large part populated by text based resources, but also with a few video and some tools. The idea underlying the design of SOA is to experiment new services, verify their relevance and efficiency and then make them available on Telearn. To some extend SOA is viewed as a sand box for ideas to be implemented in TeLearn. For this reason one will find on SOA blogs and forums linked to the resources, but not this service on TeLearn. But any search on SOA can be extended to TeLearn resources, and all news provided by TeLearn are displayed on SOA (using a RSS feed). As will appear clear in this document, this relationship has developed in another way, taking into account the requirements of the Stellar community. Already, we can mention here that this evolution is due to the significant time and effort required to cope with the requirements of the TeLearn resource description, SOA is on purpose less demanding. We will come back to this point and explain the related policy for further developments.

The roadmap described in the concluding section of the deliverable 6.1 has been followed with not too many deviations from schedule:

• Bootstrapping
  • Each Stellar contractor is affiliated on SOA
  • There is a list of the Stellar individual participants, but this list has to be consolidated
  • For those interested, the publications have been tagged with the Stellar stamp.
  • Modification of the strategy to populate the OA (see below, section **)
• Evangelism
  • All partners and the individuals registered on the Stellar distribution list have been informed of the launch of SOA, a special presentation has been made on the occasion of the Stellar General Assembly in Nice (september 2009) and the Stellar scientific portal has supported the Science 2.0 workshop held in Nice in the context of the EC-TEL conference.
  • A group of facilitators has been set up, one per partner
  • Interviews and needs oriented questionnaires have been submitted to partners and workpackage leaders (results reported in this deliverable)
• First release
  • First release in July 2009; 704 bibliographical references have been uploaded some of them with a URL or a pdf file, 1 video and a few blogs.
  • Dissemination of information about the launch of SOA
  • Creation of a specific URL http://oa.stellarnet.eu
  • Creation of RSS feeds and, additionally, of a widget

The evolution of the awareness of the existence of SOA is relatively slow, but not slower than for any other initiative of this kind. An evaluation will be ensured on the flow, based on the tools implemented in the platform. It should be mentioned that the SOA impact must be two fold, on the one hand it must address the use of the OA to upload resources, on the other hand it must address the use of the OA as scientific information resource for researchers, including visits, participation in online discussion of resources and download of material. Most of the metrics proposed to measure usage, online buzz and availability are applicable to monitor the success of the SOA.

The key indicators of the SOA include:

• Accounts: number of affiliated institutions and of registered users, active ones etc.
• User‐generated content:
  • Number of resources submitted: bibliographical reference alone , or plus link to the document, or plus associated document, as well as number of videos, tools, data sets;
  • Number of interactive contributions to blog and forum (cf. Section 5.5) specifically attached to resources;
  • Number of institutions providing a feed
• Content popularity: popular resources, downloads…
• Click‐throughs: clicks on the link to read the PDF‐file of the paper;
• Reflection: resources related to the resource the user has just viewed;
• Enrolment: monitoring of feeds consumption;
• Creation of the group of the OA facilitators: number of facilitators, their geographical spread, the number of users, documents, ... they bring to the OA.

These indicators will be analysed against the use of the OA by the Stellar institutions and researchers, either home based or provided by other institutions. Qualitative data collection will be achieved by the interview of a selected set of Stellar researchers (senior and PhD), assessing their use of open access scientific information. Indicators and interviews will be the material for a qualitative assessment of the Stellar OA impact on the consortium research integration.

This evaluation is implemented in a way which ensures its consistence with the monitoring and the recommendations of the workpackage 7 summarized by the diagram reproduced below.

3 The structure of the document

The Stellar DoW announces the deliverable 6.4 under the title “TeLearn OA evaluation of use and recommendations”. This deliverable will present the findings of our quantitative and qualitative evaluation based on the indicators we mentioned in the preceding section, and provisional recommendations to stimulate best practice and provide feedback to the network to improve the visibility of its production. The set of indicators will be improved as a consequence of this analysis.

We first review a set of quantitative indicators, then we summarize what the observations made means for the Stellar OA and the community. On this basis two qualitative analyses are reported. The first one deals with the expectations of the other Stellar instruments based on interviews of the workpackage leaders. The second one is a survey of remarks and suggestions of the partners (gathered through the SOA facilitators). Then we conclude by recommendations for the coming period.